Self-Censorship and Love

I am not on any political team. In my view, both major political parties are thoroughly corrupt. I am guided only by curiosity. It's amazing what happens to one's judgment when one renounces membership in all political tribes and their allied news media (which function as their respective PR departments). It allows you to see things that were previously invisible. Things that constitute evidence of dishonesty and hypocrisy and these things are ubiquitous, sparing no organization and no person.

It's unpleasant to have one's eyes opened like this, but that's part of the price of having access to an unfiltered stream of information. The other part is that you get to (have to) do the work to figure out what is believable. Here's a recent example: alleged corruption of Joe Biden. Many people glue themselves to left-leaning corporate media because they prefer to hear only good things about Biden. This media filtering generates a false consensus in their minds. It causes many people to conclude that Biden walks on water. It also causes many people to conclude that Trump's misconduct somehow exonerates Biden's potential corruption. There is no consensus, however.

Check out the House Oversight Committee's investigation. Lots and lots of evidence is detailed by the committee. One wouldn't know this information if one is intentionally closing one's eyes to everything other than left-leaning corporate media. I propose this thought experiment: In the Oversight Committee report, simply substitute "Trump Family" where ever you see "Biden Family" and ask yourself whether you would be deeply concerned about corruption. When I'm trying to figure out what is going on in the world, I don't give a shit about the Bidens or the Trumps. I'm concerned only about corruption, which inevitably hurts the American People.

One other thing about Biden's conduct bothers me immensely. It's a question we need to ask. Vivek Ramaswamy recently asked it:

The fact that we're sending hundreds of billions to Ukraine without Biden even once articulating why it advances U.S. national interests reeks of corruption. It's now fair game to ask whether the geopolitical disaster known as Hunter Biden has something to do with it. The bipartisan establishment, from @GovChristie to @NRO to @MSNBC, is attacking me for even asking the question. But just think independently for a moment.

[Emphasis added]. Have we been participating in the killing of 9,000 Ukrainian civilians and injuries to another 16,000 (and numerous other casualties of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers) for the reason that Joe Biden had a felt need to demonstrate his love and support for his son Hunter Biden? And see here and here. I ask this because I have not yet heard one reason why the U.S. should have gotten involved in a territorial dispute regarding the Donbas Region. Is the sanctity of the father-son bond the reason the U.S. refused a chance to resolve this war at the outset?

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Corporate Media Marching in Lockstep to the Drumbeat of War

Caitlyn Johnson reminds us of the headlines at the beginning of the Ukraine war:

No nuance here. None of the context, which could have been reported quite succinctly, as shown by comedian Dave Smith:

Continue ReadingCorporate Media Marching in Lockstep to the Drumbeat of War

Neocons Who Are Being Rewarded for their Iraq 2003 Disgrace.

Some might wonder how it is that so many of our purported leaders who lied us into waging war against Iraq aren't still universally disgraced and ejected from government jobs and public influence. But no, in fact, they were responsible for leading us into war in Ukraine. This list of neocons includes Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and William Kristol.  

Glenn Greenwald recently commented on the bizarre situation that all of these neocons not only remain in power and influential. Even worse, their warmongering views are embraced by modern day Democrats. What follows is the transcript of an excerpt from Glenn's System Update show, Episode 102:

One of the most extraordinary, alarming and baffling developments to witness in American politics is the complete rehabilitation of neoconservatives. Most Americans who know this term first learned of it in 2002 during the run-up to the American and British invasion of Iraq. The neocons were the most vocal and vehement advocates, not just of the invasion of Iraq, but more importantly, of the warmongering framework undergirding that attack, namely that the world is better off when the United States rules it, and especially the Middle East, through the application of superior military force, in essence, ordering all countries to do the bidding of the United States, always under the threat that failure to obey will result in attacks, invasions, bombings, regime change, coups and much more. This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new.

This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new. The U.S. fought wars, imposed tyrannies, and engineered coups all over the world, on every continent, during the Cold War and after but what distinguished neocons from standard warmongers and militarists were two qualities:

First, they have no other politics beyond their quest for endless war. Many neocons in fact began as liberals or even leftists and were willing to morph into anything they needed to be as long as doing so served the only issue they really cared about: placing the US in a state of endless war, almost always fought by other people's families and children rather than their own. Starting with the war in Iraq, a war they were craving and loudly demanding long before the 9/11 attacks – that attack became the pretext for the war in Iraq – they have supported every new and proposed American war since then. "Neocons" is a polite euphemism for "bloodthirsty, sociopathic warmongers."

Continue ReadingNeocons Who Are Being Rewarded for their Iraq 2003 Disgrace.

Accounting Errors for Ukraine!

Why isn't there a single solitary anti-war voice among Congressional Democrats? Not even among the supposedly far left wing of the Democrats, "The Squad." This is disgraceful. Meanwhile we have rampant drug addiction, homelessness, shitty schools and crumbling infrastructure that is ignored in American cities.

But now, $6.2B of found money will pour into the coffers of American military contractors and their lobbyists. We have an endless military budget to pay for 800 American military bases around the world and for endless war that has increased the risk of annihilating everyone we know in a nuclear holocaust. I'm not making that up. I'm referring to the October 7, 2022 statement by Joe Biden, who admitted that there is a "direct threat" of nuclear weapons being used in the Ukraine war. Biden further stated, "We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

All of this to unnecessarily take sides in a territorial dispute over the Donbass, to maintain our control over Ukraine, a country in which the U.S. deposed Viktor Yanukovych, the duly elected leader, in 2014, to install its own puppet leader. Current "foreign policy regarding Ukraine is a neocon wet dream and it offers absolutely no benefit for ordinary Americans.

As Robert Fulghum stated, "It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and our air force has to have a bake-sale to buy a bomber." [More . . . ]

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Bad Leakers and Good Leaks.

A recent document leak on Discord shows that the U.S government is lying to Americans. The contents of this leak make it clear that U.S. troops are already on the ground in Ukraine, a situation that dramatically increases the risk of direct confrontation of the U.S. and Russia, which could be cataclysmic given the current situation, already hair-trigger dangerous. The U.S. corporate news is refusing to discuss the new revelations, both the White House dishonesty and the danger on the ground in Ukraine. Why? It's entire predictable.

When the corporate news media likes the content of a leak, they don't give a rat's ass about who leaked it. On other  occasions, the corporate news media finds the leak content inconvenient, in which case they zero in, laser-like, to destroy the reputation of the leaker, harping on the illegality of the leak and simultaneously suppressing the content of the leak. This protocol is in their standard playbook, as discussed by Glenn Greenwald in "The Same Establishment Playbook is Used to Malign the Character of Leakers and Distract Attention From the Substance of the Revelations."

On a virtually daily basis, one can find authorized leaks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, on CNN and NBC News: meaning stories dressed up as leaks from anonymous sources that are, in fact, nothing more than messaging assertions that the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon have instructed these subservient media corporations to disseminate. When that happens, the leaker is never found or punished: even when the leaks are designated as the most serious crimes under the U.S. criminal code, such as when The Washington Post's long-time CIA spokesman David Ignatius in early 2017 published the contents of the intercepted phone calls between Trump's incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Most of Russiagate was constructed based on authorized leaks, a generous way of describing official propaganda from the U.S. Security State laundered in the American corporate press.

But when it comes to unauthorized leaks -- which result in the disclosure of secret evidence showing that the U.S. Security State lied, acted corruptly, or broke laws -- that is when the full weight of establishment power comes crashing down on the head of the leaker. They are found and arrested. Their character is destroyed. And now -- in a new and genuinely shocking escalation -- it is the largest media corporations themselves, such as the Times and the Post, that actually do the FBI's work by hunting down the leaker, exposing him, and ensuring his arrest.

This playback is always used in such cases and is easily recognized. The point is to shift attention from the substance of the embarrassing and incriminating disclosures onto the personal traits of the person who exposed them, so as to make the public forget about what they learned and come to see the leaker as so unlikeable that they want nothing to do with the disclosures themselves.

Glenn's System Update Episode #70 further explores the media's treatment of the Discord leaker.

Continue ReadingBad Leakers and Good Leaks.